Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[sinkler]

This QoL feature was probably requested a million times before, but can we please have a "Sort by TYPE" option?

 

inventory management of backpack and storage will be so much easier if you could group melee/guns/ammo/arrows/tools/materials/armor/vehicles/food/etc items together, and u already implemented a sort button, but the current sort feature is lacking, it seems to be high lvl sort by "type" and then second sort alphabetic, but ammo and guns and arrows are of the same type for example so they are mixed together by name, also tools and melee weapons etc...

 

a clear UI option to toggle the sort button function by proper "value/type/name" would be so much easier to use and if its not that hard to implement i would really love to see it added.

[Quantum Blue]

I agree here. On average difficulty and gamestage, difficulty should be suitable for average joe as well. This forum makes it easyto go by super cracks, who by far are not representative of the player base.

 

And if you, as an average player, can only compete on the easiest settings, its disheartening

 

So they should just remove the easiest difficultys because people are too stupid and pridefull to use them anyway?

 

I thought the idea was to try and bring people into the fold. Is it really necessary to insult some fraction of the fan base?

 

Couldn't there be other reasons besides stupidity and pridefullness that people might not use those settings?

 

Could choosing that change affect other things some people didn't want affected?

 

Heaven forbid that some forum noob ask the devs to consider something.

 

Maybe the devs will change some of the settings to make it easier. Why would you care if they did? Why would you care whatever they did? Because you could just develop your own mods? Right? Or maybe not?

 

And that post is an issue, but these aren't?

[snip]

 

===================

Official Forum Rules and Guidelines

*Updated December 6th, 2018*

 

These forums are for the discussion of 7 Days to Die, including advice, feedback and general game play talk. We ask that all posts are civil, respectful and constructive. This ensures all visitors can enjoy and benefit from these forums, plus we can more easily collect feedback (be it positive or negative) to help make a better game for all of us.

 

Inappropriate Content

Gamers of all ages view these forums. As such, any posts/signatures containing excessive profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, insults, personal attacks, accusations, pornography of any form, or abusive language will be edited or deleted and will result in a warning or ban from the forum. Please keep the age of the community in mind when posting commentary or links to adult themed topics, as excessive adult themes will also be removed.

[SnowDog1942]

I thought the idea was to try and bring people into the fold. Is it really necessary to insult some fraction of the fan base?

 

Couldn't there be other reasons besides stupidity and pridefullness that people might not use those settings?

 

Could choosing that change affect other things some people didn't want affected?

 

Heaven forbid that some forum noob ask the devs to consider something.

 

Maybe the devs will change some of the settings to make it easier. Why would you care if they did? Why would you care whatever they did? Because you could just develop your own mods? Right? Or maybe not?

 

And that post is an issue, but these aren't?

 

 

 

 

===================

Official Forum Rules and Guidelines

*Updated December 6th, 2018*

 

These forums are for the discussion of 7 Days to Die, including advice, feedback and general game play talk. We ask that all posts are civil, respectful and constructive. This ensures all visitors can enjoy and benefit from these forums, plus we can more easily collect feedback (be it positive or negative) to help make a better game for all of us.

 

Inappropriate Content

Gamers of all ages view these forums. As such, any posts/signatures containing excessive profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, insults, personal attacks, accusations, pornography of any form, or abusive language will be edited or deleted and will result in a warning or ban from the forum. Please keep the age of the community in mind when posting commentary or links to adult themed topics, as excessive adult themes will also be removed.

 

boobs

[Lonestarcanuck]

also...for A18 I would like to see a way to have materials that Zombies can't break.

 

think about it, in any Zombie movie/show/etc. they can't break everything. yes Zs are not real (yet) and so keeping with the Zombie Universe, you should have items that are zombie proof.

 

R-Con and Steel should not be breakable for example. in World War Z for example, with the fast aggrisive zombies they could not break most items.

 

maybe increase the AI for pathing and jumping and stacking, in WWZ the zombies formed a human pyramid

[Guppycur]

I agree here. On average difficulty and gamestage, difficulty should be suitable for average joe as well. This forum makes it easyto go by super cracks, who by far are not representative of the player base.

 

And if you, as an average player, can only compete on the easiest settings, its disheartening

 

It makes no sense to change the difficulty of the game when there is a difficulty level that suits your needs.

 

If your reason is you are "disheartened" to play on "easy", how are you going to feel if they shift the difficulty down across the board so you can play "normal", THEN get good and find that even "insane" isn't hard?

 

"Bored". The answer is "bored".

 

...you're asking for a major change in the game that not only affects others, but eventually yourself, for the singular purpose of not feeling "disheartened" at playing at easy level.

[Gareee]

I agree here. On average difficulty and gamestage, difficulty should be suitable for average joe as well. This forum makes it easyto go by super cracks, who by far are not representative of the player base.

 

And if you, as an average player, can only compete on the easiest settings, its disheartening

 

Thing is most people get 1000 hours of gameplay from the game or more.. you need to levels above beginning play to make it still fun 1000 or 2000 hours in.

 

First time players should start at the beginner level, and increase difficulty as they improve, and MANY games are like this. Biginning gameplay teaches you the value of the stealth system, and why you WANT to use it instead of just nerfing the gameplay by nerdpoling or block breaking just to get to treasure rooms.

[Roland]

I agree here. On average difficulty and gamestage, difficulty should be suitable for average joe as well. This forum makes it easyto go by super cracks, who by far are not representative of the player base.

 

And if you, as an average player, can only compete on the easiest settings, its disheartening

 

I disagree. A game can have a reputation for being a tough game at its default level and do just fine. There is nothing disheartening at all about playing the game on its easiest settings if those settings make the game playable and fun.

 

Consider that if TFP simply changed the wording on the menu so that the currently easiest setting was presented as default and people could increase the difficulty up to Nomad then there probably wouldn’t be anything disheartening to talk about. Casuals would happily play the default level and super cracks would shift the slider up.

 

That can happen right now with the only difference being that the easiest setting is known to be a (-2) instead of a (0).

 

I’m not saying that the devs shouldn’t tune gamestages or try to improve the pacing but there is nothing wrong with playing the game on Scavenger (-2) or Adventurer (-1) if those settings end up being more fun for someone. Especially when the main difference between the modes is exactly the answer to the player’s issue.

[Roland]

I thought the idea was to try and bring people into the fold. Is it really necessary to insult some fraction of the fan base?

 

Couldn't there be other reasons besides stupidity and pridefullness that people might not use those settings?

 

Could choosing that change affect other things some people didn't want affected?

 

Heaven forbid that some forum noob ask the devs to consider something.

 

Maybe the devs will change some of the settings to make it easier. Why would you care if they did? Why would you care whatever they did? Because you could just develop your own mods? Right? Or maybe not?

 

And that post is an issue, but these aren't?

 

 

 

 

===================

Official Forum Rules and Guidelines

*Updated December 6th, 2018*

 

These forums are for the discussion of 7 Days to Die, including advice, feedback and general game play talk. We ask that all posts are civil, respectful and constructive. This ensures all visitors can enjoy and benefit from these forums, plus we can more easily collect feedback (be it positive or negative) to help make a better game for all of us.

 

Inappropriate Content

Gamers of all ages view these forums. As such, any posts/signatures containing excessive profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, insults, personal attacks, accusations, pornography of any form, or abusive language will be edited or deleted and will result in a warning or ban from the forum. Please keep the age of the community in mind when posting commentary or links to adult themed topics, as excessive adult themes will also be removed.

 

Concerning the settings: The only differences between the difficulty settings are speed at which gamestage ramps up (which directly answers the fellows complaint) and the hp of the zombies. For a casual player those are the perfect changes to make the game more accessible. If Casual Joe wants slower gamestage progression so that Ferals don’t show up as early then the difficulty settings are the way to go. Personally I think they should make the difficulty levels purely about gamestage progression and bring back the player vs zombie and zombie vs player sliders. Then there would be absolutely no reason to play on easiest if your sole concern is how early the Ferals show up.

 

Concerning Snow Dog and the rules: You are absolutely right. Those posts you quoted are over the top and inappropriate and Snowdog definitely stepped over the line. I’ll clean those up and ask Snow to keep to the rules better. In the future, though, please use the report feature to bring such things to our attention.

[canadianbluebeer]

LOL a potato doesn't log turn off early or late, but precisely when it means to. I remember the days when we ran defrag software every night and studied the clusters and wasted time trying to get rid of a few more fragments because back then it really slowed things down.

 

Trying to get the interleave at the best setting for the low level format.

umf.

[Jackelmyer]

LOL a potato doesn't log turn off early or late, but precisely when it means to. I remember the days when we ran defrag software every night and studied the clusters and wasted time trying to get rid of a few more fragments because back then it really slowed things down.

 

Wait... We can stop defragging? :-O

 

:-p

[Jackelmyer]

@madmole, would it possible to do a re-think on what gamestage encountering ferals and radiated occur? Right now for me as a "casual" and "inefficient" player, it's not fun anymore going into a POI at a player level of 50 or so and only having a compound bow and a few arrows and having to deal with several ferals and at least one radiated at a gamestage of around 100 isn't fun. I understand that dying is always solely going to be on me, but it feels like the game rewards a person for being more efficient and having better knowledge in tactics.

 

I can empathise with this.

 

But generally speaking, IMO, a general "Difficulty" setting as it currently exists really is ill suited for 7 Days To Die. My hope is they bring in more game settings, like, for example, turning off digging, and make the Difficulty settings a template style of game settings. Where, for example, on Easy, Zombie game stage is elongated, Digging is turned off, block damage is boosted, zombie damage is nerfed, zombie health is nerfed, etc. But each of these are independent settings when starting a game.

 

I think that most of us have acknowledged that 7 Days To Die has a wide variety of ways it can be played and approached. I think that the game appeals to a huge range of players and with that a huge range of play styles.

 

Really, at least IMO, purely for the sake of the game, this to me seems like the best approach. The more you can allow players to define their game experience when starting a game, the better off I think the game will be.

 

I genuinely do not see a reason to have 7 Days To Die be a rigidly designed game out of the box. Or why anyone would want to aim this game towards a rigid design. To me, no way of playing should be off the table.

 

Someone wants zombies to always run and 1 hit concrete blocks on Game Stage 1? Go for it!

Someone wants zombies to always walk and struggle to knock down cotton plants? Have at it!

Want a base that zombies can never reach and is essentially invulnerable? Go you!

Want food to have 20% the normal effect so that your survival skills are better tested? Done!

 

Whatever the game play style, having a wide array of settings only expands accessibility and the range of players who would could enjoy the game dramatically... if only for that one setting...

 

Case in point, I don't think I'd play this game if there wasn't a drop setting for Toolbelt, Backpack, All, etc. If I were to guess, that one setting kept a lot of people interested in the game as opposed to turned off. Why TFP wouldn't take this approach in every situation is beyond me.

 

I mean... They're not building 7D2D as a hobby. If you can engage more people with more ways to play the game... How... is that not a win for everyone?

 

But I'm of the opinion that 7 Days To Die could nearly replace Minecraft and a host of other games out there. That what TFP has started shouldn't be viewed as "Get'er done and move to the next", but as something TFP can build off of over time. Or... Sell 7D2D to a company that would treat it as such.

 

The potential of this game is ridiculous. Just... absolutely... Insane.

[Survager]

How can new be old?

 

Everything new is well forgotten old! )

[Quantum Blue]

To be clear: I love the game (just under 4500 hours) and TFP can make change to any settings they want. Or change up the game any way they want. I doubt they'll lose me. (A reason I don't post very often.)

 

An I do apologize for the public reponse.

[TSBX]

Clearly you didn't read the rule about public apologies.

[Weazelsun]

I disagree. A game can have a reputation for being a tough game at its default level and do just fine. There is nothing disheartening at all about playing the game on its easiest settings if those settings make the game playable and fun.

 

Consider that if TFP simply changed the wording on the menu so that the currently easiest setting was presented as default and people could increase the difficulty up to Nomad then there probably wouldn’t be anything disheartening to talk about. Casuals would happily play the default level and super cracks would shift the slider up.

 

That can happen right now with the only difference being that the easiest setting is known to be a (-2) instead of a (0).

 

I’m not saying that the devs shouldn’t tune gamestages or try to improve the pacing but there is nothing wrong with playing the game on Scavenger (-2) or Adventurer (-1) if those settings end up being more fun for someone. Especially when the main difference between the modes is exactly the answer to the player’s issue.

 

^^, this what I'm asking of madmole, is of considerations in tuning gamestages even more to give the illusion of fairness in terms of when a player begins to encounter ferals and radiated zombies. I have no problem with the zombie AI, I can kill zombies from time to time considering I'm mostly an mp player and the server I play on has a diffulculty setting of 5, I believe. It's just the gamestage.

[Weazelsun]

I can empathise with this.

 

But generally speaking, IMO, a general "Difficulty" setting as it currently exists really is ill suited for 7 Days To Die. My hope is they bring in more game settings, like, for example, turning off digging, and make the Difficulty settings a template style of game settings. Where, for example, on Easy, Zombie game stage is elongated, Digging is turned off, block damage is boosted, zombie damage is nerfed, zombie health is nerfed, etc. But each of these are independent settings when starting a game.

 

I think that most of us have acknowledged that 7 Days To Die has a wide variety of ways it can be played and approached. I think that the game appeals to a huge range of players and with that a huge range of play styles.

 

Really, at least IMO, purely for the sake of the game, this to me seems like the best approach. The more you can allow players to define their game experience when starting a game, the better off I think the game will be.

 

I genuinely do not see a reason to have 7 Days To Die be a rigidly designed game out of the box. Or why anyone would want to aim this game towards a rigid design. To me, no way of playing should be off the table.

 

Someone wants zombies to always run and 1 hit concrete blocks on Game Stage 1? Go for it!

Someone wants zombies to always walk and struggle to knock down cotton plants? Have at it!

Want a base that zombies can never reach and is essentially invulnerable? Go you!

Want food to have 20% the normal effect so that your survival skills are better tested? Done!

 

Whatever the game play style, having a wide array of settings only expands accessibility and the range of players who would could enjoy the game dramatically... if only for that one setting...

 

Case in point, I don't think I'd play this game if there wasn't a drop setting for Toolbelt, Backpack, All, etc. If I were to guess, that one setting kept a lot of people interested in the game as opposed to turned off. Why TFP wouldn't take this approach in every situation is beyond me.

 

I mean... They're not building 7D2D as a hobby. If you can engage more people with more ways to play the game... How... is that not a win for everyone?

 

But I'm of the opinion that 7 Days To Die could nearly replace Minecraft and a host of other games out there. That what TFP has started shouldn't be viewed as "Get'er done and move to the next", but as something TFP can build off of over time. Or... Sell 7D2D to a company that would treat it as such.

 

The potential of this game is ridiculous. Just... absolutely... Insane.

 

Indeed, I originally made the post out of frustration in going to a tier 3 quest, and yes could I have just abandoned it upon seeing those ferals and radiated? Yeah, I could have. In the end I tried it and died. I just sometimes feel like as a farmer/ builder-type, I'm going to lag behind the others in terms of how to deal with the current gamestage zombies becuase the other players will have spent their time looting and preparing. Whilest I would only have a few arrows and a simple iron club. My only gripe is with the gamestage and how sometimes it feels unfair.

[Ayrton]

MM o Ronald

 

Is it too much to ask?

* composite crossbow?

* Revolver homemade (with homemade ammunition)

* winchester rifle

[madmole]

Sounds good. I always thought it had something to do with lighting, but that makes sense. Other than those, graphically speaking, the other things that drive me crazy are the LOD models for those branchy shrubs / dead tree things. Not the tiny ones, but the taller ones you see everywhere in the forest. Once I start seeing it, I can't stop.

 

I thought I deleted that one L shaped one that was kind of repetitive/obnoxious. Can you screenshot?

[madmole]

What if...the first quest you got from the trader was to give you a tutorial on how the crafting system works?

 

We already have a start tutorial for that. Speaking of, I deleted a lot of redundancies in so its faster to get through it now. less stones needed, only 1 craft needed not 2, 3, etc.

[madmole]

I was just bothered at how uneven the roads were in A17. Earlier RWG builds had some weird roads too but A17s have been pretty unrealistic and for the Alpha you introduce all the new vehicles it made it even more painful.

 

 

 

What do you mean by "nice and clean"? I hear that and think how it is now where I see a straight clean lines dividing the snow biome from the desert? Will the biomes blend more? Ideally I would like to see different grades of snow, grass, burnt stuff, etc. fading into the next ground texture but I realize that would mean there would have to be a different texture for each. Is there another way to do that?

 

Also why aren't the biomes at different elevations? Snow on top, desert at the bottom, green in between.

 

 

 

 

Me too. Keep it up!

I'm talking about the actual biome borders are no longer dithered which caused the sky/fog to spam back and forth between one biome and the next. Now the border is clean with no "noise" just like Navezgane. The ground can be blended better when we get splat maps in A18, as the texture doesn't HAVE to represent the biome 100%. so erosion on cliff faces can be textured differently than the block it actually is made of.

[madmole]

So the desert biome is definitely starting to look more like the Adrar Plateau then a typical desert, which is awesome btw! I completely understand that the biome is named desert for simplicity, but I think it would be a fantastic idea to incorporate a little more for the said biome.

 

The main suggestion would be to change the under layer terrain from the "hard sand", that has little to no structural integrity, to something a bit harder. Maybe not as hard and strong as regular stone, but something that can hold up when you spend time digging below the surface. Heck, even sand stone would work .

 

I would like to believe it shouldn't be to difficult to incorporate the change either, changing the already hard sand layer that is generated and replacing it with sandstone or something else. Maybe even a slight re-texture? But I cannot say this as I wouldn't know the repercussions of the change.

 

Take this suggestion with a grain of sand, heh I used sand instead of salt , and either ignore it or not

 

I would like to hear everyone else's thought on this as well!

 

Excited to see what else TFP bring out to for World gen ;P

Right now we have to make sand several meters thick otherwise hills have dirt or whatever showing. With splat maps we can make sand 1 meter thick with no visual anomalies.

[madmole]

I'll bring it up again, seeing as I've never read a real response. will there be a way for us to turn off digging zombies? Either by setting or mod?

 

No plans for this. You can turn off blood moons completely now in 17.2.

[madmole]

On a side note since we were covering textures - why are the storage limits for containers you produce so varied. I really like to use the bookcases, gun safes etc when setting up my base. It has a good final look to it. However, it seems that you are discouraging this because the storage space on cosmetic items is abysmal. Most of the cool containers that I can get are simply untenable because simple locked containers offer so much more (and very much needed) capacity.

 

Can the storage capacity for the cool decor be opened up to match the capacity of the locked chest or storage box?

 

No. You can easily mod that in though.

[madmole]

I've been playing with Gaia a lot making custom worlds so am familiar with the stamp process; are y'all going to be generating the stamps or pulling from a folder like Gaia does?

 

Super excited about this methodology... Even with pre determined stamps, the sliders in Gaia produce some very random cool stuff.

 

I think Justin is us creating stamps in world machine and then we have a unity node editor that controls blending, rotation and a million other things with those stamps. The results have been amazing.

[madmole]

@madmole, would it possible to do a re-think on what gamestage encountering ferals and radiated occur? Right now for me as a "casual" and "inefficient" player, it's not fun anymore going into a POI at a player level of 50 or so and only having a compound bow and a few arrows and having to deal with several ferals and at least one radiated at a gamestage of around 100 isn't fun. I understand that dying is always solely going to be on me, but it feels like the game rewards a person for being more efficient and having better knowledge in tactics.

 

Maybe you aren't optimizing your build for combat? Have you considered adjusting the speeds of the zombies with those options? I'd need more data to know if the game is too hard at level 50 or 100.